Archive for May 14, 2008

Yesterday one of my English teaching colleagues, Ainur Baisakalov, gave a talk about the “concept of the nature sacredness in the Kazakh traditional music.” Ainur first started with a tongue-in-cheek phrase “the Soviet Union has an unpredictable history.” I thought it was his way of saying Kazakhstan also has an unpredictable future because of being tied in with the Soviet Union’s “playfulness” with the truth about Kazakhstan’s history. In any case, Ainur is passionate to restore the nomadic culture and its lifestyle with its morals. He knows that the nation can never go back to the nomad’s way of life. What troubles Ainur is the young Kazakhs of today don’t know their own sacred nomadic heritage.

However, Ainur lost me when he started talking about the Slaviks being agrarian based versus the Kazakh nomadic lifestyle. The Russian farmers went by a year-by-year or linear calendar whereas the Kazakhs have a spiral upwards from birth of 6 months, then 6 years and then 12 years to make 5 rings up to 60 or 61. (the first 60 years is considered the first mashell?) He also noted that the 12 year period is a sacred number for Kazakhs and has been proven in science with Jupiter’s rotation around the Sun every 12 years. Something about a dangerous period of the psychological state of the nation or people, I wasn’t sure what that meant. But the nomads could tell the patterns of the stars and they would arrange their activities according to the signs in the nightsky. Our speaker claimed the Kazakh would look at the sky like a European looks at his watch!

Ainur had other Russian quotes he used which I’ll have to check with him on the correct translation. The best part was when he showed a young man playing a dombra instrument which was an improvization of “The Lame Horse.” To create a Kui Legend you start with a story from a sage and then a composer of music builds a tune around it, the performer tells the story first and then plays it. Soon everyone knows the story so they don’t even need to hear the legend before it is played, in this case there are 17 versions of the same. Then our speaker had a video of his skillfully playing on the piano the same dombra rendition. It was successfully captured by the composer Mendykulov. The following are the words that go with the song:

Freely lived in steppe,
The lame horse suddenly had become alerted.
Your son, disturbing
His calm,
Is lost.
To tell you this even
It is me, dombra,
Came from faraway.
All, that happened,
I will tell you.
Listen carefully to me,
Tribesman,
Headed by the khan.